how can the 8th placed team in the league winning the title be a good thing?

i thought the SPL set-up was bad until i read the last few posts itt.

Ditto.

Last few post sound mental to me.

Chilean football is broke so they need playoffs for extra money.

Mexican football is not broke, we're just money hungry.

In spite of all our mediocrity we have two things that europe should copy from us:

- the spray for free kicks
- Seeding the teams after the CL group stage. ( instead of a draw the teams get seeded from 1 to 16 based on their group stage record, highest seed plays 2nd leg at home)

deal done ages ago.

this kid done the presentation at my lads football do today, he got a huge round of applause when it was announced he would be back again when he is a ROI player (plays for NI U-17's at the min)

I have read this post 3 or 4 times and I still have no idea what is going on. I knew the Argentinian system was bad but it has nothing on this.

Should definitely do this


Don't really care about this. If they are going to seed the draw, group stage record would be a bad way to do it. It would just be a second reward for the teams who got drawn against someone like Zilina in the group stages. Seeding by anything more meaningful would just guarantee Barcelona, Madrid, Man Utd, Chelsea, Arsenal, Inter, Bayern and Milan make the Quarters nearly every year. If your goal is to make as much money as possible for the big clubs, seeding is great. If you want any interesting games in the last 16, it would be rubbish.

I dont get this. Games in the last 16 are seeded as well right now.

Just my jumbled thoughts on why seeding that draw sucks.

I kinda agree with you, in libertadores the draw is seeded a priori and based on the league results of each country.

For instance CL pots would look like this:

Pot 1: Holders, Germany 1, Italy 1, Spain 1, England 1, France 1, Russia 1 , Ukraine 1
Pot 2: Italy 2, Germany 2, England 2, etc

In this system Borrusia Dortmund and Lille would be seeded while Arsenal would be in the bottom.

http://www.sbnation.com/soccer/2011/...gentina-mexico

wow that is really really really good news.

Until 2002 we also had a different system for the Brasileirao every year.In 2003 they changed it to a standard league format after a lot of complaining specially from the media. I was glad at first but am having my doubts now.
Last 2 years the latest rounds have been rig-infested with teams dropping games to have their rivals not be champions. That happens because the league is usually really close till the end and there are many rivalries.
Another point is that nothing beats the excitement of knockout games(specially a final).

This actually happened the last year we had knockout phases in 2002. 8th place Santos(with Robinho and Diego) beat 1st place Sao Paulo(who had league's MVP Kaka, and Luis Fabiano) and went on to win the championship.

and this is why Argentina relegation system isnt that bad.

Ill have this in mind if the commentators get too ******ed.

So when is the River playoff match? Def want to see that

article some might be interested in...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9471db52-9...#axzz1PjcpontR

gives some idea what it's about.

It's a good article. It regurgitates a lot of the same stuff Kuper included in the show he did for Dutch TV a while back (BIM posted the link) but it's still worth reading.

for all the changes the stats people introduce, i hope i never see/hear anything like Suarez has a GPA 0.65

.

Quick questions for footy threads next season:

anyone have strong thoughts either way of wrapping Europa League in with UCL thread?

Any one have strong thoughts either way of dedicated threads for Spain/Germany/Italy etc, or do people prefer the one "non-EPL major euro leagues" thread?

There's probably a lot of people that like CL but don't give a **** about EL, so it's probably best to keep them seperated.

And La Liga could probably have it's own thread, but it's kinda meh to make more dedicated threads than just that one and having them together worked pretty well imo.

The new Arsenal kit for the 11-12 season:

Combining Europa with CL is a bad idea because the Europa thread managed 15 pages for the whole competition last season, while the CL thread was at least 10 times that large. The Europa posts would just get buried and would be annoying for people trying to discuss the CL as well. What I'd do is just have Europa discussion in the Random Football thread. Some of the Spurs discussion could spill into the EPL thread as well.